Published 4:00 am, Saturday, December 16, 2006

A fifth state Department of Motor Vehicles employee in Oakland was convicted Friday for her role in a scandal in which DMV workers accepted cash bribes for processing documents for illegal immigrants.

The guilty plea by 25-year-old Marla Robinson of Oakland is the latest in a case that saw DMV employees accepting bribes of as much as $4,500 per bogus document and issuing more than 200 fraudulent driver's licenses and state identification cards from November 2003 to July 2005.

Robinson pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge D. Lowell Jensen in Oakland to conspiracy to commit honest services mail fraud. An indictment unsealed in March accused Robinson of accepting bribes of unspecified amounts in June and July 2005 to process fraudulent driver's licenses for people who paid $1,000 to $1,500 to a broker, Jose Ramirez, 23, of Oakland, who was not a DMV employee.

The case against Ramirez, one of five brokers charged in the case, is pending.

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Four other DMV workers in the Oakland office were implicated in the scheme. Frances Aliganga received a 38-month sentence, and Brachelle Fifer was sentenced to six months of home detention. Stephanie Davis received a sentence of seven months in prison and seven months of home detention. Another DMV employee, Leneka Pendergrass, has pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing.

The charges were the result of a 20-month investigation in which agents followed employees, dug through one suspect's trash and spied on the Oakland DMV office at 5300 Claremont Ave. There, undercover FBI agents acting as clients were steered by brokers to specific windows where a bribed DMV worker was waiting to process them, authorities said.

Prosecutors said Aliganga entered fake Social Security numbers for some clients and had licenses issued to clients who had not taken a written or driving test.

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In one case, an undercover FBI employee intentionally marked the wrong answer on the "overwhelming majority" of the questions on the written test. Aliganga "tossed the exam aside, barely (if at all) glancing at it," FBI Agent Jason Richards wrote in an affidavit.